Download
SmartyPants 1.5.1
(20 KB) ? Fri 12 Mar 2004
What’s new?
Description
SmartyPants is a free web publishing plug-in for Movable Type, Blosxom,
and BBEdit that easily translates plain ASCII punctuation characters
into “smart” typographic punctuation HTML entities.
SmartyPants can perform the following transformations:
-
Straight quotes ( " and ' ) into “curly” quote HTML entities
-
Backticks-style quotes (
``like this''
) into “curly” quote HTML entities
-
Dashes (“
--
” and “
---
”) into en- and em-dash entities
-
Three consecutive dots (“
...
”) into an ellipsis entity
This means you can write, edit, and save your posts using plain old
ASCII straight quotes, plain dashes, and plain dots, but your published
posts (and final HTML output) will appear with smart quotes, em-dashes,
and proper ellipses.
SmartyPants is a combination plug-in — a single plug-in file that works with Movable Type, Blosxom, and BBEdit. It can also be used from a Unix-style command-line.
SmartyPants does not modify characters within
<pre>
,
<code>
,
<kbd>
, or
<script>
tag blocks. Typically, these tags are used to display text where smart quotes and other “smart punctuation” would not be appropriate, such as source code or example markup.
Version Requirements
- Movable Type: 2.5 or later (including Movable Type 3.0)
- Blosxom: 2.0 or later
- BBEdit: 5.1 or later
- Perl: 5.005 or later
MT-Textile Integration
Movable Type users should also note that SmartyPants can work in
conjunction with
Brad Choate’s MT-Textile plug-in
.
MT-Textile is a port of Dean Allen’s original Textile project to Perl
and Movable Type. MT-Textile by itself only translates Textile markup
to HTML. However, if SmartyPants is also installed, MT-Textile will
call on SmartyPants to educate quotes, dashes, and ellipses,
automatically. Using SmartyPants in conjunction with MT-Textile
requires no modifications to your Movable Type templates.
Textile is Dean Allen’s “humane web text generator”, an easy-to-write
and easy-to-read shorthand for writing text for the web. An
online
Textile web application
is available at Mr. Allen’s site.
Installation
Installation instructions and documentation are provided in the download package.
Upgrading
Upgrading from any previous version of SmartyPants is easy. Just replace your old “SmartyPants.pl” plug-in file with the new one. You don’t need to change any of your templates to reap the benefits of the numerous bug fixes. (You will need to change your templates, however, if you wish to use the new en- and em-dash shortcut.)
Why?
Because proper typographic punctuation looks sharp.
Why Not?
For one thing, you might not care.
Most normal, mentally stable individuals do not take notice of proper
typographic punctuation. Many design and typography nerds, however,
break out in a nasty rash when they encounter, say, a restaurant sign
that uses a straight apostrophe to spell “Joe’s”.
If you’re the sort of person who just doesn’t care, you might well want
to continue not caring. Using straight quotes — and sticking to the
7-bit ASCII character set in general — is certainly a simpler way to
live.
Even if you
do
care about accurate typography, you still might want to
think twice before educating the quote characters in your weblog. One
side effect of publishing curly quote HTML entities is that it makes
your weblog a bit harder for others to quote from using copy-and-paste.
What happens is that when they copy text from your blog, they copy the
8-bit curly quote characters (as well as the 8-bit characters for
em-dashes and ellipses, if you use these options). These characters are
not standard across different text encoding methods, which is why they
need to be encoded as HTML entities.
People copying text from your weblog, however, may not notice that
you’re using curly quotes, and they’ll go ahead and paste the unencoded
8-bit characters copied from their browser into an email message or
their own weblog. When pasted as raw “smart quotes”, these characters
are likely to get mangled beyond recognition.
That said, my own opinion is that any decent text editor or email client
should be able to stupefy smart quote characters into their 7-bit
equivalents, and I don’t consider it my problem if you’re using an
indecent text editor or email client.
Algorithmic Shortcomings
One situation in which quotes will get curled the wrong way is when
apostrophes are used at the start of leading contractions. For example:
'Twas the night before Christmas.
In the case above, SmartyPants will turn the apostrophe into an opening
single-quote, when in fact it should be a closing one. I don’t think
this problem can be solved in the general case — every word processor
I’ve tried gets this wrong as well. In such cases, it’s best to use the
proper HTML entity for closing single-quotes (
’
or
’
) by
hand, or to use the raw UTF-8 quote character ( ’ ).
Bugs
If the bug involves quotes being curled the wrong way, please send
example text to illustrate.
See Also
This plug-in effectively obsoletes the technique documented
here
.
However, the above instructions may still be of interest if for some
reason you are still running an older version of Movable Type.
Version History
1.5.1: Fri 12 Mar 2004
Fixed a goof where if you had SmartyPants 1.5.0 installed,
but didn’t have Markdown installed, when SmartyPants checked
for Markdown’s presence, it created a blank entry in MT’s
global hash of installed text filters. This showed up in MT’s
Text Formatting pop-up menu as a blank entry.
1.5: Tue 9 Mar 2004
SmartyPants now features automatic integration with
Markdown
,
my new text formatting plug-in. If Markdown and SmartyPants are both installed as Movable Type plug-ins, SmartyPants will add a new global text filter,
“Markdown With Smartypants”.
Preliminary command-line options parsing. See the POD documentation
for details, if you're into this sort of thing.
dot-space-dot-space-dot now counts as an ellipsis.
This is the style used by Project Gutenberg:
http://www.gutenberg.net/faq/index.shtml#V.110
(Thanks to Fred Condo for the patch.)
Added
<math>
to the list of tags to skip (pre, code, etc.).
1.4.1: Sat 8 Nov 2003
1.4: Mon 30 Jun 2003
Improved the HTML tokenizer so that it will parse nested <> pairs
up to five levels deep. Previously, it only parsed up to two
levels. What we *should* do is allow for any arbitrary level of
nesting, but to do so, we would need to use Perl’s ?? construct
(see Fried’s “Mastering Regular Expressions”, 2nd Ed., pp.
328-331), and sadly, this would only work in Perl 5.6 or later.
SmartyPants still supports Perl 5.00503. I suppose we could test
for the version and build a regex accordingly, but I don’t think
I want to maintain two separate patterns.
Thanks to Stepan Riha, the tokenizer now handles HTML comments:
<!-- comment -->
and PHP-style processor instructions:
<?php code ?>
The quote educator now handles situations where dashes are used
without whitespace, e.g.:
"dashes"--without spaces--"are tricky"
Special case for decade abbreviations like this: the ’80s.
This only works for the sequence apostrophe-digit-digit-s.
1.3: Wed 14 May 2003
-
Plugged the biggest hole in SmartyPants’s smart quotes algorithm.
Previous versions were hopelessly confused by single-character
quote tokens, such as:
<p>"<i>Tricky!</i>"</p>
The problem was that the EducateQuotes() function works on each
token separately, with no means of getting surrounding context
from the previous or next tokens. The solution is to curl these
single-character quote tokens as a special case,
before
calling
EducateQuotes().
-
New single-quotes backtick mode for
smarty_pants
attribute.
The only way to turn it on is to include “B” in the configuration
string, e.g. to translate backtick quotes, dashes, and ellipses:
smarty_pants="Bde"
-
Fixed a bug where an opening quote would get curled the wrong way
if the quote started with three dots, e.g.:
<p>"...meanwhile"</p>
-
Fixed a bug where opening quotes would get curled the wrong way
if there were double sets of quotes within each other, e.g.:
<p>"'Some' people."</p>
-
Due to popular demand, four consecutive dots (....) will now be
turned into an ellipsis followed by a period. Previous versions
would turn this into a period followed by an ellipsis. If you
really want a period-then-ellipsis sequence, escape the first
period with a backslash:
\....
-
Removed “&” from our home-grown punctuation class, since it
denotes an entity, not a literal ampersand punctuation
character. This fixes a bug where SmartyPants would mis-curl
the opening quote in something like this:
"…whatever"
-
SmartyPants has always had a special case where it looks for
“
's
” in situations like this:
<i>Custer</i>'s Last Stand
This special case is now case-insensitive.
1.2.2: Thu Mar 13, 2003
1.2.1: Tue Mar 11, 2003
-
New “stupefy mode” for smarty_pants attribute. If you set
smarty_pants="-1"
SmartyPants will perform reverse transformations, turning HTML entities
into plain ASCII equivalents. E.g. curly quotes are turned into a simple
double-quote ("), “—” is turned into two dashes, etc. This is useful
if you are using SmartyPants from Brad Choate’s MT-Textile text filter,
but wish to suppress smart punctuation in specific MT templates, such as
RSS feeds. Text filters do their work before templates are processed; but
you can use
smarty_pants="-1"
to reverse the transformations in specific
templates.
-
Replaced the POSIX-style regex character class
[:punct:]
with an ugly
hard-coded normal character class of all punctuation; POSIX classes
require Perl 5.6 or later, but SmartyPants still supports back to 5.005.
-
Several small changes to allow SmartyPants to work when Blosxom is running
in static mode.
1.2: Thu Feb 27, 2003
-
SmartyPants is now a combination plug-in, supporting both
Movable Type (2.5 or later) and Blosxom (2.0 or later).
It also works as a BBEdit text filter and standalone
command-line Perl program. Thanks to Rael Dornfest for the
initial Blosxom port (and for the excellent Blosxom plug-in
API).
-
SmartyPants now accepts the following backslash escapes,
to force non-smart punctuation. It does so by transforming
the escape sequence into a decimal-encoded HTML entity:
Escape Value Character
------ ----- ---------
\\ \ \
\" " "
\' ' '
\. . .
\- - -
\` ` `
Note that this could produce different results than previous versions of
SmartyPants, if for some reason you have an entry containing
one or more of these sequences. (Thanks to Charles Wiltgen for
the suggestion.)
-
Added a new option to support inverted en- and em-dash notation:
“
--
” for em-dashes, “
---
” for en-dashes. This is
compatible with SmartyPants’ original “
--
” syntax for
em-dashes, but also allows you to specify en-dashes. It can be invoked by
using
smart_dashes="3"
,
smarty_pants="3"
, or
smarty_pants="i"
. (Suggested by Aaron Swartz.)
-
Added a new option to automatically convert
"
entities
into regular double-quotes before educating quotes. This is mainly for the
benefit of people who write posts using Dreamweaver, which substitutes
this entity for any literal quote char. The one and only way to invoke
this option is to use the letter shortcuts for the
smarty_pants
attribute;
the shortcut for this option is “w” (for Dream_w_eaver). (Suggested by
Jonathon Delacour.)
-
Added
<script>
to the list of tags in which SmartyPants doesn’t touch the contents.
-
Fixed a very subtle bug that would occur if a quote was the very
last character in a body of text, preceded immediately by a tag.
Lacking any context, previous versions of SmartyPants would turn
this into an opening quote mark. It’s now correctly turned into
a closing one.
-
Opening quotes were being curled the wrong way when the
subsequent character was punctuation. E.g.: “
a '.foo' file
”.
Fixed.
-
New MT global template tag:
<$MTSmartyPantsVersion$>
.
Prints the version number of SmartyPants, e.g. “1.2”.
1.1: Wed Feb 5, 2003
-
The
smart_dashes
template attribute now offers an option to use “--” for
en
dashes, and “---” for
em
dashes.
-
The default
smart_dashes
behavior now simply translates “—” (dash dash) into an em-dash. Previously, it would look for “ — ” (space dash dash space), which was dumb, since many people do not use spaces around their em dashes.
-
Using the
smarty_pants
attribute with a value of “2” will do the same thing as
smarty_pants="1"
, with one difference: it will use the new shortcuts for en- and em-dashes.
-
Closing quotes (single and double) were incorrectly curled in situations like this:
"<a>foo</a>",
where the comma could be just about any punctuation character. Fixed.
-
Added
<kbd>
to the list of tags in which text shouldn’t be educated.
1.0: Wed Nov 13, 2002
Initial release.
Additional Credits
Portions of this plug-in are based on Brad Choate’s nifty MTRegex
plug-in. Brad Choate also contributed a few bits of source code to this
plug-in.
Brad Choate
is a fine hacker indeed.
Jeremy Hedley
and
Charles Wiltgen
deserve mention for exemplary beta testing.
Rael Dornfest
ported SmartyPants to Blosxom.
Don Haring, Jr.
drew the SmartyPants mascot.
Copyright and License
Copyright © 2003
John Gruber
.
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are
met:
Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice,
this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Neither the name “SmartyPants” nor the names of its contributors may
be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software
without specific prior written permission.
This software is provided by the copyright holders and contributors “as
is” and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited
to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a
particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright owner
or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special,
exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to,
procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or
profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of
liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including
negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this
software, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.